December 21, 2016

Save if for Next Year: Introducing Your Class Elf

As I'm sitting on the couch watching Christmas movies on the Hallmark channel, I'm thinking about Christmas in the classroom and how much fun we had discovering our elf this year!

Let me just tell you all about it...

We had been practicing our inferencing skills the past week and the bright idea came to me, what would be better than introducing our class elf than through a mystery box inferencing lesson of course!?

First thing I did was find my mystery box and put our elf inside with his letter from the North Pole.

Then I created 4 clues to describe our elf to use for the mystery box activity.

I played this up BIG y'all.

I was explaining the activity and looking at the clues (with this puzzled look on my face) and revealed to them that these were NOT the clues I had made for this activity! Someone must have came in and wrote new clues over the weekend...they flipped!

So on we went.....each student got a recording sheet and 1 clue. They recorded their clue and then walked around to find and record the 3 remaining clues their peers had.

Once they collected and recorded all 4 clues, they traveled back to their desk to put together the clues and visit their schema. They recorded their inference at the bottom of their paper.

Let me just tell you how excited they were once they read all their clues and "thought" it was an elf!!!!

We shared our inferences with each other and the time had come for me to reveal the mystery!

We rationalized through why they thought it was an elf and why it couldn't be other things they may have thought.

And there he sits, inside our mystery box.

I can not imagine introducing our class elf any other way than this in the future.

In fact, I was so excited I made it into a download just for you!

Now you can introduce your class elf through the mystery box or just practice inferring.

I've included 5 different sets of clues for the following mystery items:

elf, candy cane, stocking, ornament and Santa hat

You can find it available now in my Tpt store or by clicking on the product picture above.